Whitesnake’s iconic video features Jaguars

Author

Website Name

Year Published

Title

URL

Access Date

March 31, 2015

Publisher

A+E Networks

On this day in 1987, the song “Here I Go Again” by English hard-rock group Whitesnake tops the Billboard pop singles chart in the United States. Today, what most people remember about the song is its saucy video: The actress Tawny Kitaen spends a great deal of it in a white negligee, writhing and cartwheeling across the hoods of two Jaguars parked next to one another. It is one of the most iconic music videos of the 1980s, and it features two of the most famous cars in pop-culture history.

Whitesnake first released “Here I Go Again” in 1982, on the album “Saints and Sinners.” That early version didn’t crack the charts–so, five years later, the band re-recorded the song and included the new, more amped-up version on their album “Whitesnake.” While they were working on the record, the band’s lead singer David Coverdale started dating a young woman named Tawny Kitaen, who had recently starred opposite Tom Hanks in the movie “BachelorParty.” When director Marty Callner met Kitaen, he was smitten too–and he cast her immediately in the video for “Here I Go Again.” “I knew I wanted to have a sexy woman in it,” Callner told a reporter. “Sex is a part of rock ‘n’ roll and the song was about sex.”

The video was mostly unchoreographed: Coverdale and Callner simply parked their Jaguars side by side in the middle of the set, blasted the song and ran the cameras as Kitaen improvised. After “Here I Go Again” became such a massive hit, however, directors and record companies deduced that fast cars and scantily clad women were a winning combination, and they scrambled to include them in their videos whenever they could.

The Swallow Sidecar Company, the company that eventually became Jaguar, was founded in 1922 in Blackpool, England. It sold motorcycle sidecars and, starting in 1926, reconditioned car bodies. In the early 1930s, the company began to manufacture its own cars from scratch, and at the end of World War II it changed its name to Jaguar Cars. In 2008, Jaguar sold more than 65,000 cars worldwide.

Also on this day

The hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro reaches a dramatic climax when U.S. Navy F-14 fighters intercept an Egyptian airliner attempting to fly the Palestinian hijackers to freedom and force the jet to land at a NATO base in Sigonella, Sicily. American and Italian troops surrounded the plane,...

General William Howe is named the interim commander in chief of the British army in America on this day in 1775, replacing Lieutenant General Thomas Gage. He was permanently appointed to the post in April 1776.
General Howe’s first major battles against his American counterpart, General George Washington, including the Battle...

On this day in 1862, Confederate General John Bankhead Magruder is given command of the Trans-Mississippi Department. A Maryland native, Magruder attended West Point and graduated in 1830. He distinguished himself during the Mexican War (1846-48) when he commanded a company during General Winfield Scott’s campaign from Vera Cruz to...

In the conclusion to an extremely embarrassing situation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower offers his apologies to Ghanian Finance Minister, Komla Agbeli Gbdemah, who had been refused service at a restaurant in Dover, Delaware. It was one of the first of many such incidents in which African diplomats were confronted...

Former U.S. postal worker Joseph Harris shoots two former co-workers to death at the post office in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The night before, Harris had killed his former supervisor, Carol Ott, with a three-foot samurai sword, and shot her fiance, Cornelius Kasten, in their home. After a four-hour standoff with...

A powerful storm slams the islands of the West Indies, killing more than 20,000 people, on this day in 1780. Known as the Great Hurricane of 1780, it was the deadliest storm ever recorded.
At the time of the Great Hurricane, the American Revolution was winding down and British and French...

The United States Naval Academy opens in Annapolis, Maryland, with 50 midshipmen students and seven professors. Known as the Naval School until 1850, the curriculum included mathematics and navigation, gunnery and steam, chemistry, English, natural philosophy, and French. The Naval School officially became the U.S. Naval Academy in 1850, and...

During the October Crisis, the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), a militant separatist group, kidnaps Quebec labor minister Pierre Laporte in Montreal. Five days earlier, FLQ terrorists had seized British trade commissioner James Richard Cross. In exchange for the lives of the men, the FLQ demanded the release of two dozen...

Less than a year before Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States, Spiro Agnew becomes the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace. The same day, he pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of...

At the Battle of Tours near Poitiers, France, Frankish leader Charles Martel, a Christian, defeats a large army of Spanish Moors, halting the Muslim advance into Western Europe. Abd-ar-Rahman, the Muslim governor of Cordoba, was killed in the fighting, and the Moors retreated from Gaul, never to return in such...

On this day in 2004, the actor Christopher Reeve, who became famous for his starring role in four Superman films, dies from heart failure at the age of 52 at a hospital near his home in Westchester County, New York. Reeve, who was paralyzed in a 1995 horse-riding accident, was...

On this day in 1881, Charles Darwin published The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms. He considered the work a more important accomplishment than his The Origin of Species (1859), which turned out to be one of the most influential and controversial books in history.
Darwin, the...

On October 10, 1935, George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess premieres on Broadway.
Porgy and Bess began its journey to the Broadway stage in 1936, when George Gershwin wrote a letter late one night to the author of a book he was reading proposing that the two of them collaborate on...

On this day in 1877, the U.S. Army holds a West Point funeral with full military honors for Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Killed the previous year in Montana by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Custer’s body had been returned to the East...

On this day in 1951, President Harry S. Truman signs the Mutual Security Act, announcing to the world, and its communist powers in particular, that the U.S. was prepared to provide military aid to “free peoples.” The signing of the act came after the Soviet Union exploded their second nuclear...

On October 10, 1957, the Milwaukee Braves defeat the New York Yankees to win their first World Series since 1914. (They played in Boston then; the team moved to Wisconsin in 1953.) No one expected the Braves to beat the Bombers: After all, the New York team had already won...

In the first major operation since arriving the previous month, the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) joins with South Vietnamese Marines to strike at 2,000 North Vietnamese troops 25 miles from An Khe in the Central Highlands.
The 1st Cavalry Division was a new kind of division, which was built...

The U.S. Navy transfers 80 river-patrol boats to the South Vietnamese Navy in the largest single transfer of naval equipment since the war began. This was part of the ongoing Vietnamization program, which had been announced by President Richard Nixon at Midway in June. Under this program, the...

On this day in 1916, Italian forces during World War I initiate the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo, essentially continuing a previous assault on Austrian positions near the Isonzo River and attempting to increase gains made during previous battles in the same region.
The mountainous terrain around the Isonzo, at the...

On this day in 1944, 800 Gypsy children, including more than a hundred boys between 9 and 14 years old are systematically murdered.
Auschwitz was really a group of camps, designated I, II, and III. There were also 40 smaller “satellite” camps. It was at Auschwitz II, at Birkenau, established in...